We'll be a $1Bn company by next year: Mindtree CEO Rostow Ravanan

Mindtree CEO Rostow Ravanan talks about Mindtree's focus on digital and how are they discovering leaders for its digital transformationAvik Das&Shilpa Phadnis | TNN | September 10, 2016, 10:12 IST

Rostow Ravanan took over as Mindtree CEO, from Krishnakumar Natarajan, on April 1. He was among the founders of the company and was CFO for ten years, leading the company to its IPO in 2007.

Prior to becoming CEO, he headed the enterprise service lines group and was responsible for the European operations. In an interaction with TOI, Ravanan talks about Mindtree's focus on digital.

Mindtree had targeted to touch $1 billion in revenue several years ago. But you're still some way away from it.

The $1 billion number will come next year. Last year, we did a little over $700 million. Unless something dramatically goes wrong with the world, logically we should get there next year.

We would have been happy if we had got it by now. But I'm not unhappy because we didn't look at the number as a single-dimension goal. We want to make Mindtree a memorable journey.

Mid-sized IT firms have to have strong differentiators, else it's tough competing with the big guys. Several mid-sized firms have become acquisition targets.

Mindtree is not up for sale, all of us are enjoying what we are doing. Yes, if you stay generic, there is a problem. You need to differentiate on scale or on capability. Big guys have enormous scale. We have put a stake in the ground to become big in digital.

What exactly are you doing in digital?

It starts from sales transformation. While meeting the CIO, the traditional approach of people resources and quality does not work any longer.

The aim is how do you make the chief information officer (CIO) look impressive in front of his/her boss and his customers. Businesses now increasingly expect technology to be the agent of change and expect us to devise strategies that are driven by ideas.

Our aim is to create a sales team that will work with various processes of MindTree, stitch them together and deliver it to the CIO.

Moreover, an IT team or the CIO is not the only tech spender any more. The marketing officer and the CFO also today use a part of their budgets to spend on technology. But these new users are not well conversant with the technical language, so the challenge of the sales team is to morph themselves to connect to them better.

Customers want us also to be more collaborative, but many of us do not have that mindset. If a startup can provide a solution to a customer better, we should be open to forging an alliance with it to work for the customer.

How do you discover leaders to spearhead the digital transformation?

We hired Korn Ferry to help us with our leadership benchmarking. They are working with us from a HR consulting standpoint rather than executive search.

We did away with the bell curve and replaced it with a quantitative appraisal ranking this year and we got some market validation and client implication. We have a structured process of identifying high performers, giving them cues and creating specialized learning paths.

We have two programmes for high potentials ­ a management track and a tech track. For the tech track, we are working with professors from Cornell University to understand the future of tech.

Are you still confident about beating Nasscom's revenue guidance of 10-12% for the year, given the uncertainties after the Brexit vote?

We will beat the Nasscom guidance. The first quarter was slow, customers cancelled orders.

Even in this quarter there will be some challenges. But we expect second half of the year to be strong with stable margins and high growth. There is uncertainty due to Brexit, but client cut-back on spending happened even earlier this year.